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Remember the old joke… “I’m a VC and I’m here to help”? Well, at OpenView Partners it is no joke. We have a firm where the mission after we invest venture capital is to help founders, CEOs and their management teams build great companies with a focus on every company reaching a successful exit (not an asset sale) — and not the old 3 out of 10 model.

Now, you might be thinking everyone says that. But what OpenView delivers goes way beyond that tired old VC value proposition of “We have a Rolodex of people that we can help you with.” I know everyone is from Missouri (the Show-Me State) in today’s world so I thought I would write about a couple of meetings we had last week at our quarterly forum (Sales Execution Workshop) for the portfolio companies held at OpenView.

During the forum we met with a couple of CEOs I work with to discuss their top Q1 initiatives that OpenView Labs might be able to help them with. Below is what OpenView Labs and the company CEOs agreed were the initiatives they would like our help on during Q1:

Company A

OpenView Labs Recruiting team will spend will 1-2 days with their internal recruiter reviewing their recruiting processes to determine how to assist and improve them.

OpenView Labs Recruiting team will help find and screen candidates and recruit two field sales executives and two pre-sales executives.

The OpenView Go To Market team will help them with the website strategy (emphasis on content marketing) and design for their new website.

When the Company onboards their VP of Marketing OpenView will have our Content Marketing Adviser Joe Pulizzi engage with them around their content marketing strategy

OpenView Labs adviser Jeff Sutherland will continue to work monthly with the development team around improving the agile development and product management processes and productivity.

Company B

OpenView Labs Recruiting and Go-to-Market teams recruit, train and build a Business Development/Lead Qualification team to provide qualified opportunities to their field sales executives. The Labs teams will work with the VP of sales and need to:

Develop the job description

Find and screen and hire candidates

Effective Enterprise prospecting scripts/conversation Guides

Effective Enterprise prospecting email templates

Common Objections/responses to those rejections

FAQs

Implement the proper processes, train the team and set up to SF.com

OpenView Labs Research team provide list of companies for the Business Development/Lead Qualification team to reach out to to generate qualified opportunities using the latest criteria developed for their market segments

I don’t know what you think, but to me the above is a lot more than a Rolodex. If you want a VC that is really there to help check us out: